R.E.M.

“It’s happened like, three times over the last couple years,” says R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe. “I’m sitting in a café or a restaurant somewhere, and I’ll hear a song that sounds familiar and I’ll go, ‘God, that is so great. What is it?’ And over the din, the glorious din of a roomful of people yammering, I’ll find out … Jesus! It’s something I recorded when I was 21 years old.”

Stipe is conducting interviews from his dressing room in Philadelphia’s Wachovia Center, where R.E.M. is rehearsing with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band for the opening night of MoveOn.org’s six-city Vote for Change tour. The band has set up camp for several days as members do press for their 13th studio release, Around the Sun.

As is expected of a band of R.E.M.’s stature, the press junket is frenetic and haphazard. Interview times get bumped as media crews are shu­ed from room to room of the historic Ritz-Carlton Philadelphia. Reporters get 15 minutes with each member of the band, no matter how big or small the publication … at least, that’s what they tell us. Band members answer their questions graciously and professionally. All in all, it’s a far, frenzied cry from the band’s languid genesis in Athens, Ga.

Talk About the Passion
“All of us loved music,” Stipe says of those early days. “We all knew what it was to have a song on a record forever and ever. You couldn’t go back and change it if you don’t like it. And that led me into this kind of phase for our first couple records where the idea of creating something timeless was really important to me. The idea that 20, 50 years later, someone could hear one of these songs and it would have this very present quality to it.”

R.E.M.’s early catalogue has endured, largely because of its warm, personal feel—like a handmade sweater or a cup of homemade soup. From the start, expressions of genuine concern like “So. Central Rain” and good advice like “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville” held an intimate place in the kudzu-wrapped hearts of music lovers who appreciated the band’s homespun approach to its craft—an approach both direct and oblique, masterful and naïve. In its infancy, R.E.M. was a refreshing break from the polished, arena-rock excess of groups like Journey and the contrived quirkiness of the New Romantic bands being shipped over from England.

“I didn’t like the way everything was so linear and literal in the world,” says guitarist Peter Buck. “It was the New Wave era, so every record you’d buy had four or five guys wearing wacky glasses and red shirts with zippers on them. We were a lot artier than your average rock band, so we wanted something that was more reflective of who we were, you know? Like this Southern vine that grows around this abandoned train trestle. That said more about us than a picture of us in our new clothes would.”

Maps and Legends
Although R.E.M. was very much a product of its environment, the band seemingly created art in a vacuum. By eschewing trends and outside influences, it made Southern America seem suddenly exotic, even to their countrymen. Hailing from a region previously known mostly for red clay and rednecks, they were refreshingly literate and eccentric—a lead singer who claimed he could predict earthquakes, a bass player who supposedly could smell ants, and a guitarist who shared his audience’s undying faith in the redemptive power of rock ’n’ roll. Dealing in jangly rhythms and whispered impressions, R.E.M. truly was the stuff of dreams.

Growing up listening to tracks like “Camera” and “Perfect Circle,” I became utterly convinced Stipe was capable of channeling random thoughts from the spirits of those long departed—a conviction born out by his haunting performance of “Swan Swan H” in the movie Athens, Ga. Inside/Out [see the Paste DVD sampler]. In an abandoned Southern Gothic church, Stipe transformed his angelic 26-year-old frame into that of a twittering Civil War veteran with the weight of a new century on his shoulders. That musicians of such artistic accomplishment could walk the streets of their sleepy college town as ordinary citizens added significantly to their mystique.

“I used to collapse poetically on a couch at the end of a record with my hand on my forehead and say, ‘I’ll never be able to do this again,’” Stipe says of the process that resulted in those early recordings. “I just completely drained myself. I put everything I had into not only writing the stuff but the process of recording and mixing and making the decisions you need to make to get it on a record.”

It was hard work, but R.E.M. was on a roll. In interview after interview and with each new release, the band forged a new kind of contract with its fans—one that showed it was uniquely aware of its own mythology and that it would work hard to preserve that which made R.E.M. special. Band members swore they would never lip-sync their music videos. They swore they would never play venues with more than 10,000 seats. Most famously, they prophesied a break up on New Year’s Eve, 1999, with their integrity intact.